Tag: business

“Getting stores back up and running after natural disasters has become something of an art form for large companies, and nearly every major restaurant and retail chain has developed a way to contend with this brand of weather-related chaos. ‘We have an operations response team, and this is all that they do,’ says a Cracker Barrel spokeswoman. ‘The team deals with natural disasters.’”

“MLMs sell themselves using self-empowerment language and sparkly beauty products. They’re #girlboss mythology repacked for Christians and Mormons; entrepreneurialism for women brought up believing men should be the breadwinners; and a peppy dream for millennials who were told they could do anything.”

Every moment ever photographed was a Kodak moment. Until they f***ed it all up … The Kodak moment now marks the implosion of an amazing brand, the moment they missed how consumer behavior was shifting. It marks the hubris to resist the forces that made it successful. Worst of all, it commemorates the rift between a brand’s vision and the people who make a brand what it is.

One of the reasons that Silicon Valley exists is that we have all worked next to somebody who has gone off and been successful. We know firsthand that the guy next to us that went off and was very successful was an idiot.

Our heavy investments in Prime, AWS, Kindle, digital media, and customer experience in general strike some as too generous, shareholder indifferent, or even at odds with being a for-profit company. “Amazon, as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers,” writes one outside observer.

But I don’t think so.

To me, trying to dole out improvements in a just-in-time fashion would be too clever by half. It would be risky in a world as fast-moving as the one we all live in.

More fundamentally, I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align.

Of the most talked-about tech companies, Facebook by far received the least love. While Amazon, Apple and Google all ranked in the top five with total scores above eighty out of 100, and Microsoft ranked 15th with a “good” score above 75, Facebook came in 42nd – sandwiched between Best Buy and T-Mobile – with a score of just over 65, or what Fronk described as the borderline between “average” and “poor.”

“Facebook suffers badly from lack of trust,” Fronk said.

Amazon arguably collects as much personal data about its customers as Facebook does about its users, or at least if not as much, then possibly more intimate: purchase history, product search history, home address, credit card numbers.

‘Amazon is predominantly a virtual company where you don’t get to see the people. You don’t see brick and mortar,’ says Robert Fronk, executive vice-president of reputation management at Harris. ‘For them to first of all have the highest reputation, but more importantly to be the company with far and away the highest emotional appeal, is amazing.’ Harris defines emotional appeal as trust, admiration and respect, not whether you get weepy when your package arrives.

[AngelList founder Naval Ravikant] came back to a theme he’d touched on earlier in the interview, about how the world would be increasingly made up of very small startups interacting with each other through APIs. No big corporations.

To see how radical this idea is, look around the startup ecosystem. All of the most promising Web companies have done mega growth rounds at huge valuations. Facebook raised well over $1 billion in private equity before even going public and employs thousands. Even VCs and entrepreneurs who believe startups can change the world, believe you have to get big eventually. Sure you can be capital efficient at the beginning, but not at the end of a journey.

Ravikant argued that Instagram wasn’t a fluke — it’ll start to be the norm. He countered criticism that Instagram didn’t monetize by saying they only would have needed a handful of people to do it. And he went a step further, saying that Google and Facebook likely didn’t need 80 percent of the people working there. He argued Facebook could be built today with just a few hundred people.

This will be possible, he says, because future things will start to be outsourced that we couldn’t dream of being outsourced today. And whole armies of workers would wake up everyday, log onto whatever crazy hardware we’re using at the time, and get a daily assignment from a variety of companies — much like an Uber driver.

It’s now accepted-going-on-cliché to say things like ‘software is eating the world’, which is an aggressive way of assuming that every company now has to be at least a bit of a technology company, and those that want to grow rapidly even more so. Many new companies targeting industries as diverse as eyeglasses and baby food are, at the outset, leveraging technology for everything they do: supply chain management, marketing, recruiting, internal communication, product development, and so on. This makes these businesses look like technology companies, if you squint. But, of course, they aren’t. They’re eyeglasses and baby food companies.

…‘Tech company’ and ‘tech startup’ are over-applied labels that have outlived their usefulness. Calling practically all growing contemporary businesses ‘technology companies’ is about as useful as calling the enterprises of the industrial era ‘factory companies’; it accurately describes an aspect of what they are (or were), but it doesn’t really capture the totality of their operation. It certainly doesn’t tell you anything substantive about how they’ll behave in the market over the long term, which is probably the most useful reason to label a business at all.